Books, arts and culture

Louvre-Lens

Culture in the provinces

CAN a beautiful room built atop a suburban coal tip save a town that has very little else going for it? That’s what the people of Lens in northern France are hoping with the opening of Louvre-Lens, the first satellite branch of France’s national treasure-house.

In the 19th century, the region became an economic powerhouse built on the labouring class. It inspired Emile Zola’s 1885 novel “Germinal” about a coal-miners’ strike. But since the last mine closed in the 1980s it has been left to degenerate. Unemployment remains as high as the pyramidal slag heaps still dominating the sodden plain. Daniel Percheron, president of the Nord-Pas de Calais region who led the successful bid to bring the €150m ($196m) project to Lens, is explicit in wanting to follow “la rue Bilbao”, Bilbao’s “Guggenheim effect“, named for the outpost museum credited with changing the fortunes of the Basque town.

Ahead of the public opening on December 12th, mechanical diggers are still churning mud around the minimalist aluminium-and-glass building designed by SANAA, a Japanese architectural practice noted for its success in rendering the solid ethereal. Instead of reaching up to strike a vertical mark against the sky in echo of the area’s medieval belfries, the five pavilions, strung-end-to-end, aim to reflect and become one with the gravid clouds. “We wanted to make a new kind of public space, a beautiful object that emphasises the diffuse light of the area,” says Kazuyo Sejima, SANAA’s founder. It is an understated offering when compared to the bold shapes of the Guggenheim Bilbao or the seductive curves of the Pompidou-Metz.

The museum’s permanent display will be in the spectacular Galerie du Temp, a 120m-long space containing a 5,500-year timeline illustrated by 205 artefacts gleaned from the mothership in Paris. (Louvre-Lens will not house its own collection.) The display takes in classical marbles, Islamic ceramics, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens and Meissen china—all major objects, not bits and bobs from the storerooms. It ends with Eugène Delacroix’s luminous oil painting, “Liberty Leading the People” (pictured below), a sentimental highlight from the Paris museum that celebrates the July revolution of 1830. These objects will remain here for five years, a number of them being changed regularly, before the display is recreated with a new selection.

The decision to have the pieces free-standing rather than hung allowed SANAA to take the radical step of lining the gallery in polished aluminum and slightly curving the walls (the floor is gently concave too). It is a subtly torqued thing of shimmering beauty which allows the collection to gleam ghostly in its walls, reflecting visitors back among the objects like creatures in a forest. It is an extraordinarily gentle coup de théatre.

The curatorial vision is revolutionary compared with the Louvre’s academic display of art by school and country. Here, though still chronological, pieces are grouped by theme so that artefacts are in dialogue. The folds of the chemise in Domenico Fetti’s painting of Melancholy clutching a skull, for example, are echoed in the stone ruffles of a Baroque funerary monument displayed next to it. There will also be temporary thematic exhibitions in side galleries, such as the current one on the Renaissance.

Mr Percheron, while invoking the working-class history of Lens, puts his faith in “tourism being the industry of the future.” His region funded the bulk of the museum’s capital cost and will support the €15m annual bills. The European Union gave €37m. The museum is the centrepiece of a wider, somewhat misty-eyed, regeneration master plan for the wider commune, called Euralens. This plan is modelled on Euralille, a project for economic regeneration in nearby Lille—these plans, and other cultural and sporting projects in the region, are part of a wider effort to transform the image of the north of France.

Xavier Dectot, director of Louvre-Lens expects 700,000 visitors in the first year and 500,000 per annum after that: “If you make another Louvre,” he says, “the first thing you want is a different kind of public.” This public, explains Mr Dectot, is made up of locals who don’t have access to culture, the 14m people within a 200km radius, and visitors lured by the region’s attractions, including the nearby historic towns of Arras and Valenciennes. The coal basin has also recently been declared a World Heritage Site for its industrial history (although this may not be a tourism draw). So having built it, will the visitors come? The museum’s director will be relying on curatorial innovation and its boutique selection of art hits to attract the crowds.